"Ed Barker: The Bank of England is running up huge losses – and then sending the bill to the taxpayer"

Conservative Home: 20 May 2024: Ed Barker (Chief Executive of Conservative Way Forward) writes about his organisation's new report

"When Gordon Brown handed over responsibility for controlling inflation to the Bank of England in 1998, it sounded sensible on paper... But if we choose to hand over political power to experts and institutions, they must then be held to account for their performance – just as forcefully as we do for politicians...

...Conservative Way Forward has produced [a] report “The Bank of England: An International Outlier”.The central finding is stark: by the end of 2025, the Bank of England will have cost every British household a “Bank of England Surcharge” of £5,546 for the preceding four years. This is a cost being imposed on British households that no other major Western central bank is imposing on its population...

...Controlling inflation is the Bank of England’s central goal – the entire reason for its existence... But the Bank of England missed its target by...

Little surprise that Mervyn King, the former Governor, said recently that “groupthink” at the Bank had fuelled the inflation crisis, and that a lack of “dissenting voices” and “intellectual diversity” at the Bank meant it failed to stop inflation from surging to a more than 40-year high..."

Accountability in politics really matters. I hope our report can play a part in shedding some light on this opaque and often misunderstood area.

As the 48 parliamentarians said in their recent letter to Jeremy Hunt: the Bank of England is “out of step with the central banks of most major economies”; its approach is “saddling our constituents with entirely avoidable bills, and this is being done with no public or parliamentary debate or consultation.”

FULL ARTICLE HERE

READ CONSERVATIVE WAY FORWARD REPORT HERE